Innholdsfortegnelse for September 28, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, October 1, 2016–January 2, 2017; the Art Institute of Chicago, February 19–May 7, 2017; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, July 14–October 1, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Lynn Zelevansky, Elisabeth Sussman, James Rondeau, and Donna De Salvo, with Anna Katherine Brodbeck and others. Carnegie Museum of Art/ Art Institute of Chicago/ Whitney Museum of American Art/DelMonico/ Prestel, 320 pp., $75.00; $45.00 (paper) Amid political turmoil and then systematic repression, Brazil in the 1960s was a nation seething with creativity. Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto took bossa nova to a global audience. Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, and other directors and screenwriters associated with the Cinema Novo movement won awards at…

Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization by Brian Fagan. Yale University Press, 346 pp., $30.00 The Doryman’s Reflection: A Fisherman’s Life by Paul Molyneaux. Seashore, 284 pp., $18.99 The classic story of the rise of human civilizations traces food procurement from hunting and gathering to the domestication of animals and plants. In Fishing, Brian Fagan makes the case that this account misses a crucial third element—the harvesting of marine and aquatic resources. Far from being a peripheral activity, Fagan argues, the collection of marine resources has been a central and enduring element in human nourishment. It is also the only way of obtaining food that has persisted from the time of our distant ancestors into the present in a largely unmodified form. “The net, the spear, the hook and line,…

1. When I was twenty and studying French literature in Paris, I signed up for an independent project in translation. My adviser’s only stipulation was that I translate something that hadn’t made its way into English. Ignorant of contemporary French literature in a profound way—I’d read only what had been assigned across ten years of classes, a predictable march from Villon to Montaigne to Rabelais to Proust—I solicited suggestions from professors. They came back with the same name: Pierre Michon. Why Michon? Because, they said, he’s one of our greatest living writers. In 1989, this was very much a minority opinion. Michon’s complete works amounted to three slender books, as I discovered in a bookstore near my school. The earliest, Vies minuscules (1984), ran to two hundred pages; Vie de…

The Fall of the House of FIFA: The Multimillion-Dollar Corruption at the Heart of Global Soccer by David Conn. Nation Books, 328 pp., $27.00 At dawn on May 27, 2015, Swiss police raided Zurich’s five- star Baur au Lac hotel and arrested seven senior officials of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). According to the Guardian journalist David Conn, “Some of them were led out of back doors into waiting cars, and shielded from photographers by thoughtful hotel staff holding Baur au Lac bed sheets in front of them.” The Swiss police were acting jointly with the FBI; then- FBI director James Comey described the defendants as having “fostered a culture of corruption and greed.” As Conn recounts in The Fall of the House of FIFA, much of the…

Does the First Amendment need a rewrite in the era of Donald Trump? Should the rise of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups lead us to cut back the protection afforded to speech that expresses hatred and advocates violence, or otherwise undermines equality? If free speech exacerbates inequality, why doesn’t equality, also protected by the Constitution, take precedence? After the tragic violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, these questions take on renewed urgency. Many have asked in particular why the ACLU, of which I am national legal director, represented Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, in challenging Charlottesville’s last-minute effort to revoke his permit. The city proposed to move his rally a mile from its originally approved site—Emancipation Park, the location of the Robert…

A few weeks ago, Mahawon Kawang, the operator of a small radio station in the ancient Thai city of Chiang Mai, got a phone call from the National Council for Peace and Order, also known as Thailand’s military government, inviting him to the local army base for a “conversation.” Mahawon went. To ignore an invitation from the NCPO is a criminal offense, usually punished by six months in jail. There were seven military officers present at the meeting, he told me, plus a representative of Thailand’s broadcasting authority. They were friendly and polite; there was no roughing him up or any threat to do so, but the message was nonetheless forceful and clear. Mahawon had commented on the air about a delicate topic in Thailand, an investigation of a large…

Debths by Susan Howe. New Directions, 144 pp., $15.95 (paper) The poet Susan Howe is probably best known today for a book published more than thirty years ago that is not by any conventional definition a work of poetry. My Emily Dickinson (1985) is a hybrid prose work including elements of literary criticism, cultural history, personal essay, lyric rhapsody, and aesthetic manifesto. Much of it consists of quotations, often with minimal or no comment. These come from Dickinson’s poems and letters, but also from Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, Jonathan Edwards’s sermons, Shakespeare’s history plays, the Brownings, Emily Brontë, and other sources. They are a record of Dickinson’s reading—and Howe’s. The “My” in Howe’s title is both a modest admission of partiality and an emphatic claim of possession. My Emily Dickinson…

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A.O. Scott. Penguin, 291 pp., $17.00 (paper) This Thing We Call Literature by Arthur Krystal. Oxford University Press, 136 pp., $26.95 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach, translated from the German by Willard R. Trask, with an introduction by Edward W. Said. Princeton University Press, 579 pp., $24.95 (paper) Two lucid and intelligent books, A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism and Arthur Krystal’s This Thing We Call Literature, explore the same complex theme: criticism as a public art and a public service, performed, however, by critics who speak for themselves, addressing individual readers, not a collective public. Both books draw maps of the disputed border between popular and elite culture and…

The resienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community by H. G. Adler, translated from the German by Belinda Cooper, with an afterword by Jeremy Adler. Cambridge University Press, 857 pp., $125.00 The resienstadt, the concentration camp about forty miles north of Prague, held a unique place in the Nazis’ campaign of extermination. While its main purpose was to gather Jews from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany for deportation to the death camps in Poland, it was presented to the outside world as a self- governing Jewish settlement, to support the fiction that the removal of Jews from German society was being carried out in a humane fashion. The camp had an internal Jewish administration, which, under the absolute control of the SS, had an important part in carrying out both…

Jean Renoir: A Biography by Pascal Mérigeau, translated from the French by Bruce Benderson, with a foreword by Martin Scorsese. Ratpac Press/Running Press, 942 pp., $35.00 (paper) In 1961, on a television program for the French network ORTF, the filmmaker Jean Renoir talked about the superior quality of primitive art. The immaculate technique displayed by Greek sculpture of the seventh and fifth centuries BCE is “perfectly boring,” he told the interviewer, Jacques Rivette. But he thought the figures from the Mycenaean period (circa 1600–1100 BCE), though “poorly formed, barely squared- off,” were overwhelming in their artistic and emotional expression. He found similar qualities in Egyptian painting, Etruscan pottery, tapestry before the arrival of high warp and dyeing, and the films of Charlie Chaplin. In his own work, Renoir—who was born…

This text is the last thing that Liu Xiaobo, the literary critic, poet, and human rights activist, wrote. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, two years after he was imprisoned for eleven years on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.” His “crime” was to speak out for freedom of speech, basic human rights, and democratic elections. He died on July 13 of liver cancer in a hospital in Shenyang. The Ms. G. referred to in Liu’s text was a close friend of his wife, Liu Xia. Ms. G. had asked Liu to contribute a preface to his wife’s forthcoming book of photographs, Accompanying Liu Xiaobo. Although barely able to write, he managed to scribble this love note. Since expressions of love, except for the Communist Party…

People, money, Ireland. These are the three big questions on which the immediate future of the Brexit project hinges. When European Union leaders meet in October, they will decide whether “sufficient progress” has been made in talks with the British to allow for the opening of substantive negotiations to determine the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU after it leaves in March 2019. As the EU’s lead negotiator Michel Barnier put it last May: I . . .made very clear that the [Irish] border issue will be one of my three priorities for the first phase of the negotiation. Together with citizens’ rights and the financial settlement. We first must make sufficient progress on these points, before we start discussing the future of our relationship with the UK. By the…

Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life by Jonathan Gould. Crown Archetype, 533 pp., $30.00 Half a century has passed since the shocking disappearance of Otis Redding at age twenty- six, when the twinengine Beechcraft carrying him and most of his touring band the Bar- Kays to a concert crashed in a Wisconsin lake on December 10, 1967. For many who were around then, the time elapsed has not alleviated the shock. The subtitle of Jonathan Gould’s new biography, An Unfinished Life, properly acknowledges the pang of lost possibilities that accompanied that news bulletin. It came at a time of much violence and protest against violence, and was followed soon enough by further catastrophic losses. In the midst of all that, it was hard to give any meaning to Otis’s death beyond…

Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897 an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, June 30–October 4, 2017; and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, October 28, 2017– January 7, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Vivien Greene. Guggenheim Museum, 112 pp., $65.00 There is something somber, spooky, certainly humorless about the salon originally curated by Joséphin Péladan and now recreated in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Though largely forgotten, this salon of Symbolist painting, sculpture, and graphic and decorative arts was enormously popular in the 1890s and an important step toward the modernist abstraction that was to follow, including the work of such figures as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian (undoubtedly the reason a museum of modern art like the Guggenheim would be interested…

America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History by Margaret E. Wagner, with an introduction by David M. Kennedy. Bloomsbury, 371 pp., $45.00 The Great War a three-part television series produced by Stephen Ives and Amanda Pollak for PBS’s American Experience War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918 by Michael Kazin. Simon and Schuster, 378 pp., $28.00 Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism by Nick Fischer. University of Illinois Press, 345 pp., $95.00; $32.00 (paper) As our newspapers and TV screens overflow with choleric attacks by President Trump on the media, immigrants, and anyone who criticizes him, it makes us wonder: What would it be like if nothing restrained him from his obvious wish to silence, deport, or jail such enemies? For a chilling…